[2]
As a second labour he ordered him to kill the Lernaean hydra.1 That creature, bred in the swamp of Lerna, used to go forth into the plain and ravage both the cattle and the country. Now the hydra had a huge body, with nine
heads, eight mortal, but the middle one immortal. So mounting a chariot driven by Iolaus,
he came to Lerna, and having halted his horses,
he discovered the hydra on a hill beside the springs of the Amymone, where was its den. By
pelting it with fiery shafts he forced it to come out, and in the act of doing so he
seized and held it fast. But the hydra wound itself about one of his feet and clung to
him. Nor could he effect anything by smashing its heads with his club, for as fast as one
head was smashed there grew up two. A huge crab also came to the help of the hydra by
biting his foot.2 So he killed it, and in his turn called for help on Iolaus who, by
setting fire to a piece of the neighboring wood and burning the roots of the heads with
the brands, prevented them from sprouting. Having thus got the better of the sprouting
heads, he chopped off the immortal head, and buried it, and put a heavy rock on it, beside
the road that leads through Lerna to Elaeus.
But the body of the hydra he slit up and dipped his arrows in the gall. However,
Eurystheus said that this labour should not be reckoned among the ten because he had not
got the better of the hydra by himself, but with the help of Iolaus.
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1 Compare Eur. Herc. 419ff.; Diod. 4.11.5ff.; Paus. 2.37.4; Paus. 5.5.10; Paus. 5.17.11; Zenobius, Cent. vi.26; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica vi.212ff.; Tzetzes, Chiliades ii.237ff.; Verg. A. 8.299ff.; Ov. Met. 9.69ff.; Hyginus, Fab. 30. Diodorus and Ovid multiply the hydra's heads to a hundred; the sceptical Pausanias (Paus. 2.37.4) would reduce them to one. Both Diodorus and Pausanias, together with Zenobius and Hyginus, mention that Herakles poisoned his arrows with the gall of the hydra. The account which Zenobius gives of the hydra is clearly based on that of Apollodorus, though as usual he does not name his authority.
2 For this service the crab was promoted by Hera, the foe of Herakles, to the rank of a constellation in the sky. See Eratosthenes, Cat. 11 (who quotes as his authority the Heraclia of Panyasis); Hyginus, Ast. ii.23.
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